Masking based Data Hiding and Image Authentication Technique (MDHIAT)

In this paper a masking based data hiding and image authentication technique (MDHIAT) has been proposed by embedding a message/image into a colour image. Bits from authenticating message/image are embedded in single bit position under each byte of the source image by choosing a standard 3 times 3 mask in row major order. Point of insertion of a bit is obtained by computing modulus operation of the position of the image byte within the mask and an integer s whose value lies between 1 and 8. A message digest MD-5 has also been generated from authentication message/image and inserted into the source image in same manner to impart additional security. Experimental results show a good fidelity in embedded image when the value of s is less than equal to 6. Results are compared with the most popular steganographic algorithm S-Tools in terms of histogram, noise and, standard deviation analysis where proposed MDHIAT shows better performance in compared to S-Tools.

[1]  Kian-Lee Tan,et al.  Steganographic schemes for file system and B-tree , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[2]  Chien-Chang Chen,et al.  Robust image authentication method surviving JPEG lossy compression , 1997, Electronic Imaging.

[3]  Sorina Dumitrescu,et al.  Detection of LSB Steganography via Sample Pair Analysis , 2002, Information Hiding.

[4]  Ning Liu,et al.  Statistically Secure Digital Image Data Hiding , 2005, 2005 IEEE 7th Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing.

[5]  Nameer N. El-Emam.  Hiding a Large Amount of Data with High Security Using Steganography Algorithm , 2007 .

[6]  Nasir D. Memon,et al.  Analysis of LSB based image steganography techniques , 2001, Proceedings 2001 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.01CH37205).

[7]  Vincent Rijmen,et al.  The NIST Cryptographic Workshop on Hash Functions , 2006, IEEE Secur. Priv..

[8]  V. Sridhar,et al.  Multivariate entropy detector based hybrid image registration , 2005, Proceedings. (ICASSP '05). IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2005..

[9]  G. Wornell,et al.  Quantization index modulation: a class of provably good methods for digital watermarking and information embedding , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (Cat. No.00CH37060).

[10]  Pierre Moulin,et al.  A framework for evaluating the data-hiding capacity of image sources , 2002, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[11]  Joseph A. O'Sullivan,et al.  Information-theoretic analysis of information hiding , 2003, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.